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:sl:/Peace To All

Religious Extremists In 3 Faiths Share Views

By Claudia Parsons
Wed Jun 13, 2007 5:48pm ET
Reuters

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Violent Muslim, Christian and Jewish extremists invoke the same rhetoric of "good" and "evil" and the best way to fight them is to tackle the problems that drive people to extremism, according to a report obtained by Reuters.

It said extremists from each of the three faiths often have tangible grievances -- social, economic or political -- but they invoke religion to recruit followers and to justify breaking the law, including killing civilians and members of their own faith.

The report was commissioned by security think tank EastWest Institute ahead of a conference on Thursday in New York titled "Towards a Common Response: New Thinking Against Violent Extremism and Radicalization."

The report will be updated and published after the conference.

The authors compared ideologies, recruitment tactics and responses to violent religious extremists in three places -- Muslims in Britain, Jews in Israel and Christians in the United States.

"What is striking ... is the similarity of the worldview and the rationale for violence," the report said.
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It said that while Muslims were often perceived by the West as "the principal perpetrators of terrorist activity," there are violent extremists of other faiths.
Always focusing on Muslim extremists alienates mainstream Muslims, it said.

The report said it was important to examine the root causes of violence by those of different faiths, without prejudice.

"It is, in each situation, a case of 'us' versus 'them,'" it said.

"That God did not intend for civilization to take its current shape; and that the state had failed the righteous and genuine members of that nation, and therefore God's law supersedes man's law."
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COMMON WORLDVIEW

This worldview was common to ultranationalist Jews, like Yigal Amir, who killed Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin in 1995, to U.S. groups like Christian Identity, which is linked to white supremacist groups, and to other Christian groups that attacked abortion providers, it said.

"Extremists should never be dismissed simply as evil," said the report.

"Trying to engage in a competition with religious extremists over who can offer a simpler answer to complex problems will be a losing proposition every time."

Harvard University lecturer Jessica Stern, the conference's keynote speaker, spent five years interviewing extremists for her 2003 book "Terror in the Name of God: Why Religious Militants Kill."


She said it was dangerous for U.S. President George W. Bush to use terms such as "crusade" or "ridding the world of evil."

"It really is falling into the same trap that these terrorists fall into, black and white thinking," Stern told Reuters on Wednesday.
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"It's very exciting to extremists to hear an American president talking that way."

Stern said to compare violent extremists from the three faiths was not to suggest that the threat was the same.

"These are not equivalent," she said. "The problems arising from Christian or Jewish extremism are not threatening to the world in the same way as Muslim extremism is."

Conference organizers say their aim is to develop a nonpartisan strategy to combat religious extremism.

The guest list includes representatives of the State Department, Homeland Security, the New York Police Department and the U.N. missions of Israel, Iraq, Britain and the Organization of the Islamic Conference.

© Reuters 2007. All Rights Reserved.

Source:
http://today.reuters.com/news/artic...=&cap=&sz=13&WTModLoc=NewsArt-C1-ArticlePage2
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I agree, it is actually a very good article and indeed what I hoped you would begin to see. That all sides have religious extremists and they must all be dumped into the same category and judged together. We cannot rant about one and not put equal blame on the others.
 
rav said:
I agree, it is actually a very good article and indeed what I hoped you would begin to see. That all sides have religious extremists and they must all be dumped into the same category and judged together. We cannot rant about one and not put equal blame on the others.
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Peace rav,

I already knew that all sides had their extremists. But, my goal was to point out the non-Muslim extremists, because quite a few people are in denial about that fact and always shedlight on only the Muslim cases and some even go out of their way to make excuses for those non-Muslims.

Also, I or other's aren't singling out the non-Muslim cases, Just for the sake of wanting to be one-sided. But, we know that non-Muslims post acts committed by Muslims, so, in all fairness, we have a duty to balance it out and level the playing field, and expose the non-Muslim acts, also.

You guys (non-Muslims, not You specifically) already post your cases, so we have evry right to post ours, also...
 
The worst part about these extremists, is that they are often RIGHT about what their holy books say, and that gives them a certain measure of credibility and shields them from ideological attack.

It doesn't take much stretching to turn many of these texts into these horrible actions. It is the moderates who gloss over much of the text, not the extremists. The bible says to not suffer witches to live and to stone people to death for just about everything. It clearly shows that God does indeed "hate fags" as the radical Fred Phelps is so fond of screaming.

Any ideology so into black and white thinking and that so clearly and venomously divides "us" vs "them" so to declare that "them" justly deserve eternal torture simply for not being "us", is going to create a few killers.
 
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